Friday, July 28, 2000

35 Years at the Dome: No Thanks for the Memories by Kip Yates

It was billed as the 8th Wonder of the World. A beacon of new and improved
times, it was to be the first ever-domed baseball park. Neither rain, sleet,
nor snow could stop the throngs in Houston,
Texas from enjoying the American
past time. A new age was dawning, the space age, and what better way to usher
in this new era than with a brand spanking new domed stadium with a name right
out of the Jetsons. The Houston Colt .45's had been conceived in 1962 and had
only been a major league team for three years, but now they were taking their
franchise to the next level. The Houston Colt .45's hadn't seen a whole lot of
success in their relatively short life span, but for the Houston Astros, all of
that was about to change. The Houston Astros, featuring a short, spry rookie
second basemen and future Hall of Famer named Joe Morgan, were moving
into a much improved ballpark that would send them galloping out of the
Twentieth Century and skyrocketing into the 21st.

The Houston Astros moved out of temporary home, Colt Stadium (now rebuilt in
Torreon, Mexico), and into their space-age home on April 9, 1965. For the very first
game ever at the new pad, our brave space cadets played the New York Yankees.
The Yankees were baseball's royal family and featured the beloved Mickey
Mantle. The Astros prevailed over the Yanks 2-1 in that first ever game,
albeit an exhibition game, at the newly christened Harris County Domed Stadium,
or, as it was better known, the Astrodome. The victory over the defending
American League champs was a harbinger of better times to come. Certainly, a
brighter future lay ahead for the Houston Astros. The rag tag Colt .45's had
morphed into the new look Astros and would lay to waste even the proud
juggernaut that was the New York Yankees and conquer any foe in the National
League, whether they were the powerful LA Dodgers or St. Louis Cardinals. And
they would leave other laughing-stock franchises such as the New York Mets or
Atlanta Braves in their dust. At least that is what was supposed to happen.
Sadly, the glorious future turned into year after year of unfulfilled
expectations and the Houston Astros had to watch those same Dodger and Cardinal
teams enjoy postseason success, while teams like the Braves and the Mets passed
them by, often at the Astros’ expense.

I grew up in Arlington, Texas rooting for the hapless Texas Rangers.
Rooting for the Texas Rangers was particularly tough because of the bonehead
moves the front office under owner Brad Corbett consistently made. Local
legend has it that Mr. Corbett used to make trades on the backs of bar napkins.
So long story short...I could not afford to give my undying allegiance to a
sorry franchise that routinely made unsound business decisions, so I gave up on
them. I took my allegiance south to Houston,
Texas. It was the summer of 1980
and something was catching on in the city by the Gulf...playoff fever. I had
yet to witness this phenomenon in baseball, though I was extremely familiar
with it in football, being a Dallas Cowboys fan. Where my Rangers had failed,
my adopted Astros were succeeding. That summer, led by manager Bill Virdon
and newly acquired million-dollar man, Nolan Ryan, the Astros were
finally a winning franchise.

The 1980 Astros captured a piece of me that I can never take back. I gave so
much to them. I completely forgot about the Rangers like the wicked stepsister
they were. I now belonged to the other team down the highway. Never mind the
ribbing I would take when the Astros and Rangers met for their traditional
grudge match before their futile seasons began! Never mind that my Houston
Astros lost the very first game I ever saw them play. Current pitching coach Vern
Ruhle and the Astros went down in defeat to Craig Swan and the Mets.
It would take them eighteen years to finally win a game with me in attendance
against the expansion Colorado Rockies!

For all the adoration I gave to the Houston Astros, the losses I witnessed
in person paled in comparison to the heart-wrenching playoff losses my beloved
’Stros suffered one way or the other through the years. I could do nothing but
shake my head and mutter, "Wait till next year!" circa Brooklyn. The only problem was that next year sometimes
took a decade to arrive. In between lay much futility and below par years.
However, no one can disclaim that when the Astros finally did get their chance
to perform in the postseason that they did not shine. Their luster just wore
off at the most inopportune times.

The Houston Astros have lost every single playoff series they have ever
played. Yet, I cannot ever give up hope on them picking themselves up and
hopping back onto the field to challenge once again for that elusive first
championship. The Astros always seemed to never be far from reaching the next
plateau in the postseason. They always conjured hope when all seemed to be
lost. Miracles were never out of reach. And just when you thought everything
was going to be all right and they were actually going to win, BAMMO! Something
outright ridiculous always reared its ugly head. In the strike-shortened 1981
season The Astros lost a two game lead over the eventual World Series Champion
Dodgers in the best three out of five Division Series. They were only able to
get two runs across the plate in the final three games played at Dodger
Stadium. The fall before, in 1980, the Astros blew a two games to one lead in
the NLCS. They came within three outs of playing in their first ever World
Series, but blew a three run ninth-inning lead to the eventual World Series
Champion Philadelphia Phillies and (eventually) lost in the fourteenth-inning
of the final deciding game.

Six years later, led by manager Hal Lanier and his blue collar crew
featuring pitcher Mike Scott and scrappy Phil Garner, the Houston
Astros lost a tightly contested six game series against the Mets. The last two
games were lost in extra innings. The final game of the series was a memorable,
sixteen inning loss in which the Astros again blew a three run lead in the top
of the ninth-inning. Both the Mets and the Astros exchanged runs in the
eleventh-inning; but the Astros could only score two runs, one less than the
Mets, in the final frame. The Mets were the eventual World Series Champions
over the Boston Red Sox, another team all too familiar with their own
postseason collapses.

In 1998, the Astros finished the regular season with their best record to
date, 103-59. The outlook was good. They were hosting the San Diego Padres, who
had finished last only a year earlier, in the Division Series. On top of all
that, the Astros had an ace up their sleeve. They had made a deal at the
trading deadline for Seattle's
Randy Johnson, probably the most feared fireballer in baseball. Johnson
had been virtually unbeatable since joining the Astros and his home ERA at the
Astrodome was ludicrous. 1998 was the year! It was our year. Johnson lost a
game one pitcher's duel with Kevin Brown when the Astros’ bats went silent
and the momentum of the series took a 180-degree turn. The Astros eventually
lost in four games. I personally regarded that loss as the toughest one the
Astros had succumbed to. That was until the fall of 1999.

The Astros had fought Central Division foe, the Cincinnati Reds, in a
neck-and-neck battle for first throughout the regular season. They weathered
injury storms and the near fatal seizure of manager, Larry Dierker, but
when the dust had settled, the Astros had won the division title on the final
day of the season. Their hard-fought victory earned them the right to play the
Braves, the best team in the National League, in a playoff rematch of the
one-sided 1997 Division Series. The Astros took the first game and went home
confident with their chances of beating the Braves. While trailing the third
game 2-0, the Braves came roaring back in the sixth inning to take the lead.
But it wasn't over! In the bottom of the tenth inning, with the bases loaded
and no outs, the Astros had the Braves against the wall. Their most consistent,
postseason offensive threat, Carl Everett was at the plate. When he
swung at Kevin Millwood's ball four offering and hit a dribbler to the
mound, the Braves had the first out of the inning and a little breathing room.
As a fan you try not to think about past playoff ghosts; but I watched,
horrified, an all too knowing blankness permeating my being. I knew what was
going to happen next. Yet I watched as Tony Eusebio hit a screaming
liner up the middle and Ken Caminiti lumbered home from third with the
winning run. The Astro bench erupted and poured onto the field to welcome
Caminiti in open arms and hoist the hero, Eusebio, onto their shoulders in
loud, voracious victory. If it had only happened that way! Braves manager Bobby
Cox had replaced error prone shortstop Jose Hernandez earlier with
the more reliable Walt Weiss, who snatched Eusebio's liner from thin air
and nailed the lumbering Caminiti at home before the victory celebration could
begin. The Astros lost the game and more or less the series in the
twelfth-inning.

Crazy stuff! Such is the recipe for the franchise postseason futility. Wild,
crazy, wacky, insane! I cannot explain why the Houston Astros cannot get over
the playoff hump any more than I can explain why Jeff Bagwell and Craig
Biggio's bats go soft come October. I cannot even venture to guess why such
immortals as Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson were vulnerable in their postseason
starts. I cannot fathom how Joe Sambito could just lose everything that
made him unstoppable in previous relief appearances and self implode like he
did in 1980 against the Phillies. These are all questions I can't answer. I
want to. Are the Houston Astros cursed? Are the baseball gods punishing them
these many years later for beating the Yankees? It sounds ludicrous but try
explaining that to a Red Sox fan that watched Bucky Dent's puny fly ball
go over the Monster. Or try to explain the silliness of a Bambino curse to Bill
Buckner! Granted, Astro fans have not even come close to the sorrow
experienced by die hard Sox and Chicago Cub fans, but even those franchises
heartaches had to begin somewhere. Maybe, just maybe, the Astros problems
started on that spring day in 1965 when they left Colt stadium behind and moved
into the Astrodome. After all, the spacious Astrodome and her green-carpeted
field have contributed to many letdowns in October.

The dimensions of the Dome are far too steep for just any hitter. One has to
be a prolific power hitter to continually reach the fences at the dome and many
a shot toward the fences have drifted into an outfielder's mitt. Sluggers like
Jeff Bagwell and Jimmy Wynn have accomplished a great deal more than
what is customary considering that they play half their ball games in the
stingy Dome. It has always been a doubles ballpark and the Astros have done
well in drafting and signing speedy doubles hitters like Biggio and Cesar
Cedeno. Instead, the Astrodome has been regarded as a pitcher's ballpark,
which explains the recent success of Jose Lima and earlier success of Greg
Swindell. It is also no coincidence that Astros pitchers generally are
often among the league leaders in pitching.

Aside from the dimensions, the cavernous ballpark has had other problems
that even a rocket scientist couldn't foretell. First, the Dome's roof was made
of glass panels. It looked real pretty from outside, like a "space
station" off the highway; but it played ugly from inside like a drunk,
naked, coed softball game. On sunny days, the light shining through the glass
panels created problems for outfielders trying to catch high pop-ups. Judge Roy
Hofheinz, the "Father of Indoor Baseball" and the mayor of Houston, was the genius
that built the Astrodome and her glass ceiling; but it took the village idiot
to fix the "glaring" problem. The solution was simple really. They
just painted over the glass panels and the problem was solved. No more dropped
flies and no more busted noggins ...and no more green grass! Without sunlight,
the luscious green grass died. Major League Baseball would not tolerate its
game being played on yellow grass so the grounds crew just painted it green
before homestands and did minor touch-ups between games. Problem solved! Now
Major League Baseball also would not tolerate its player's playing God's game
with green paint on their uniform. (Though I guess those uniforms of the ’70s
and ’80s were OK.) So everyone was sent back to the lab because there was no
way that this thirty-one million-dollar stadium was going to serve as only a
place for Republican Conventions and as a gathering ground for Jehovah's
Witnesses. The Astrodome was built for the Astros and the Astros were going to
make it their home come hell or high water. (Incidentally, the only rained out
game at the Astrodome was due to flooding and well... high waters). So "a
team of scientists" set out to make the Astrodome playable and what they
developed brings me to the other problem with the Dome and consequently played
a role in Astro postseason failures...Astroturf!!!

Astroturf, the man-made, hideous, career-shortening, synthetic garbage named
after my beloved Astros has come to be the bane of all professional sports.
Astroturf has ended many careers and led many others to a hasty demise. It also
plays wicked wonders on routine ground balls hit in the infield that seem to
take off like a rocket, whizzing past shortstops' heads, zipping into the
outfield before caroming off the wall with a hard thud. It can make All Star
fielders look like error-prone journeymen. The wear and tear of laying on
artificial turf for half of a season can wreak havoc on a human body and this
has been a prominent problem for the Astros, as they have never entered the
postseason at 100%. Both teams that they have played in the past three Division
Series have been teams accustomed to playing on natural grass. It is not
presumptuous to suggest that teams that play on natural turf are crisper than
the teams that play on artificial turf when it comes time to play in the
extended season. The facts speak for themselves. The last team that played on
artificial turf to play in a World Series was the 1993 Toronto Blue Jays. The
turf at the Astrodome is so old and dilapidated that players have likened it to
playing on asphalt. 81+ games of Major League Baseball played on a parking lot
are not conducive to winning championships.

This season the Astros leave the Astrodome and will try to plant the seeds
of success that eluded them at their old home. Enron Field is supposed to be a
wholly different park than the Astrodome. It is reported to be a hitter’s
ballpark with short fences down the lines. We'll all know soon enough. Enron
Field also will have a retractable roof and enable the Houston Astros to play
on natural grass. It will mark the first time the Houston Astros have played on
home grass in 25 years. Will the Astros finally get over the hump and win their
first World Series Championship this year, or if not this year, sometime in the
near future while the "Killer B's" are still wearing stars? I hope
so. I hope I'm not 70 years old and still waiting for that first one. I am
aware that the Astrodome, though hard on the body and the senses, was not the
sole cause for the playoff futility. Offensive power failures and defensive
lapses cannot always be blamed on ballpark dimensions and silly playing
surfaces. Though playing outdoors on grass in a launching pad can't hurt! The
Houston Astros have a new red and black pinstriped look, a new home, some new
faces, and hopefully a new outlook. I hope their only worries now are the
mosquitoes.